Listless. Inconsistent. Neurotic.

I recently completed my first Tales game for a portable gaming device: Tales of Hearts. It was actually a decent Tales game. I was impressed with the content, but it wasn’t the best Tales game ever to exist. Symphonia,Abyss and Vesperia still hold much higher spots, but this is much better than Graces or Xillia IMHO. Here is my meager review (spoilers included!), broken down into categories:

Talk about finding a time machine! While browsing around Hulu the other night, I came across a ton of “old school” anime that I haven’t seen in years! [insert hipster look] I was watching anime before it was cool (lol)! But seriously, I recall the days of stopping by the local Suncoast video store and perusing their single tiny shelf of anime VHS tapes, making sure I purchase the subtitled versions over the dubbed!

For many years (5+), I stopped watching anime due to the lack of good stories. It seemed that everything coming out were recycled from shows I’ve already seen. Slap on different character names and chose different hair colors and there’s the newest anime. Add in a dash (or in many cases, a heap full) of fanservice and there ya go!

So I stopped watching.

Due to the lack of stuff to occupy my time lately, and access to the Crunchyroll PS4 app, I’ve been either using my new elliptical or planted on our couch catching up on tons of anime. A lot of it was horrible and honestly made me wonder why I even bothered. Watching paint dry would probably be more entertaining. However, the other day, I was on a queue-fest with the Crunchyroll app. I queued up about a dozen different anime, selectively watching the first few episodes and either putting them on hold or deleting them from my queue, wondering WTF was I thinking. One of the anime that has drawn me in and kept me marathon-ing is Chihayafuru.

I miss the days when we could sit down to a good offline “couch” co-op game. I’m not too familiar with that term, but it seems to be used with describing console co-op games such as Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance. It seems that the only way to get anything close to playing co-op would be to play another MMO, but after putting up with the toxic communities that plague that genre for over a decade, I can no longer stomach it.